Final Words

The performance and power characteristics of Samsung's SSD 840 Pro are as close to perfect as we've seen from any drive this generation. In all but a handful of benchmarks, the 840 Pro is the fastest consumer SSD we've ever tested. Even more important than its industry leading performance is the fact that the 840 Pro delivers great performance while remaining one of the lowest power SSDs to make it through our labs. Assuming the premature death of our review sample was a fluke and not indicative of a bigger issue, the 840 Pro could be the first drive in quite a while to offer the absolute best performance at power consumption levels that are notebook friendly. Update: Our replacement 840 Pro also died prematurely, I'd recommend holding off any purchases until we hear back from Samsung as to the cause of death. Update 2: It looks like this may have been a firmware issue. Retail drives should ship with fixed firmware.

The 830 proved quite reliable, so as long as Samsung can guarantee similar levels of compatibility and reliability out of the 840 Pro it looks to have a real winner on its hands.

The vanilla 840 is super interesting. We've never tested a 3bpc MLC drive in house, and although Samsung isn't promising huge cost savings initially - over time the move to 3bpc MLC will aggressively drive mainstream SSD prices down.

Yeah, and no measurement of read power usage. Even though the typical user probably do an order of a magnitude more reads than writes. But thats a general anandtech testing problem, too much focus on the write specs instead of the more important read specs.Reply

The Anand hd bench was an excellent tool for comparisons, and one of the great tools Anand provided for us for delivering bm that reflected real world usage.

What i derived from the first 2010 results was that the samsung disk was bad, but not so bad as it was portrayed by the reviewers and Anand. They were not worth their money, but they were slammed way to hard. At that time if we look at fx. strartup times, they were practically as fast as the fastest, so the criticism was ok, but a tad overblown.

At that time many producers was as Anand said, not focusing enough on random 4k, but i can say for sure, nothing but random 4k write was usable here at anandtech at that time too :)Reply

As usual, I'm curious about the data retention properties of drives, and how they change across a drive's lifespan as P/E cycles increase. It would be difficult to check directly, but perhaps the manufacturers can reveal the details? I also wonder if TLC will be disastrous in this regard.Reply

I asked about that in the Q&A session we had with Samsung engineers today but unsurprisingly, they couldn't tell us specific numbers. I hope to get my hands on 120GB 840 and 128GB 840 Pro to see what's the write endurance like, though that will take a while to test.Reply